The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.  For six or seven years, the XR industry has been selling upgrades to people who already believe. Better resolution, more compute, a sleeker strap — for the same early-adopter audience already wearing a headset. I kept waiting for someone to answer the obviou...

Smart glasses had a moment at Augmented World Expo 2026 — and I was there for all of it. Here's your preview of what's coming. Sending this from a co-working spot in Japan, where I'm traveling for work and a little pleasure after AWE. I'll be honest: rather than wait to record a polished intro for every episode, I wanted to drop this quick update so you know what's heading...

Rural hospitals hold some of the most reliable receivables in finance — money owed by the US government — yet they can't borrow against them. Banks won't price the risk. So hospitals pledge buildings instead, starving themselves of capital. Joseph Riddle, Chief Commercial Officer at Capital Pulse, watched this problem up close before his company built the AI that cracks it: a model valui...

Most climate communication talks at people. It delivers facts, projections, timelines — and wonders why nothing changes. Facts land in the head, not the gut. Immersive media like XR, AR, VR changes that. When you're standing inside a story, it stops being abstract. You feel it. That's the conviction behind Agog, the Immersive Media Institute, and why co-founder Chip Giller believes XR is...

What does it take to stay committed to a vision when the technology is still developing? Russell Patton has been inside Snap working on camera glasses and AR smartglasses for over a decade.  He's a Staff Product Manager on Snap Spectacles, and we recorded this episode at Snap's Spectacles Developer Bootcamp in Santa Monica, where 50 of the world's top lens creators gathered to advan...

Every health tech founder wants to change the system. But Warren Templeton, Managing Director at Health2047 , will tell you that without financial sustainability, the mission dies on the vine. "No mission without margin" isn't a compromise — it's a precondition. In a sector where impact is measured in lives and dollars at the same time, Warren argues that founders who can'...

We train our bodies. We track our steps, our sleep, our resting heart rate. But when it comes to mental wellness — the skills that help people regulate, process, and recover — most people never learn them until something breaks. The tools exist. Cognitive behavioral therapy has 50 years of evidence behind it. And those tools work just as well before a crisis as after. Almost nobody knows that. Lea...

Meet the HealthTech Impact Award Winners. Five innovators with five real, personal inspirations that keep them focussed and building.  Ellyn Ito co-founded InnerStill after her 15-year-old son became suicidal during the pandemic. Every avenue they tried fell short. That search led to MindVybe — a patented wearable neuromodulation device using vagus nerve stimulation and acupressure point regulatio...

Most vehicle research happens in ideal conditions — short commutes, familiar routes, full battery. Katie Tucker wanted to know what happens when the conditions aren't ideal. As Global Customer Research and CX Insights Manager at General Motors, she led a study that sent 40 Blazer EVs and more than 80 drivers on cross-country road trips to find out what customers actually need when the stakes...

Most technology implementations in healthcare fail in the same place: the moment after go-live, when clinicians are supposed to just know how to use the system. Dr. Stephanie Lahr, Chief Medical Officer at uPerform , spent years watching that happen from the inside — as a physician, as a CIO, as a CMIO — before deciding to fix it. uPerform is a just-in-time learning platform built for health syste...

Value-based care has a transparency problem. Payers have their number. Providers have their number. Nobody can agree on what truth is — and that disagreement is quietly costing providers money they should be reinvesting in their communities, their staff, and their patients. Rachael Jones, CEO of Syntax Health, a Lightbeam Health Company, spent 25 years in healthcare — starting in a hospital in Pat...

America's healthcare system has been claiming to put patients first for decades. Miriam Paramore, founder and CEO of RX Utility , has spent 42 years in health IT watching that claim go unmet — and she built her company to fix the part where patients get hurt most: what they pay out of pocket at the pharmacy. The math is stark. Employers pay the negotiated net price on medications after rebate...

In December 2024, a Guidehealth customer needed blood pressure readings from thousands of seniors — fast. Over 200 people making calls for 20 straight days was the traditional answer. Guidehealth deployed an AI voice concierge instead. It collected over 2,000 readings in days, and about 15% came back elevated — undiagnosed hypertension cases that needed escalation. That was the proof of concept. N...

The NIH issued a policy encouraging the inclusion of women in clinical research in 1986. It took until 2016 — 30 years — for sex to be formally accepted as a biological variable. Camille McWhirter, VP of Clinical Trials, Real World Data, and Cancer Registry at Omega Healthcare , has been in and around clinical research for over 20 years and considers that gap one of the most consequential data pro...

We're almost 60 episodes in and I haven't really introduced myself. Oops. Hi. I'm Nathan C (they/them), and I started The Tech Glow Up as my love letter to the founders and innovators I've had the privilege of meeting throughout my career. The people who are building things that matter, quietly, with everything they have, often without nearly enough support or recognition. I sa...

For 25 years, Dr. David Buchanan called quality his hobby. In healthcare, you get paid for volume — not for keeping people healthy. Every hospital admission he prevented, every chronic condition he managed well, was essentially unpaid work. He did it anyway. Then he discovered global capitation, and everything changed. At Town Square Health , the company David co-founded after eight years as Chief...

The same surgery. The same doctor. The same hospital. Same insurer, but a different insurance plan and a price that's three times higher. That's not a hypothetical. It's the daily reality of healthcare in 2026, and it's what Dr. Allison (Alli) Oakes, VP and Chief Research Officer at Trilliant Health , has spent her career trying to fix. Alli sat down with Nathan C Bowser live a...

Everyone says AI in healthcare needs a "human in the loop." Fewer people can tell you what that actually means. This live Vive 2026 episode of The Tech Glow Up features two health IT veterans who are done waiting for theory to catch up with practice. Virginia Halsey, SVP of Product and Strategy at First Data Bank , has 35 years in health IT and a clear view of where medication workflows...

The revenue cycle is one of healthcare's most expensive blind spots. Health systems pour everything into clinical excellence and then leave money on the table through billing leakage, under-coded claims, denied authorizations, and documentation gaps that erode reimbursement for genuinely complex care. Nitesh Shroff, co-founder and CEO of Arintra , has spent five years building the AI infrastr...

Most AI reads your words. Attune Media Labs built one that reads your body, your mannerisms, your culture. David and Robert Bosnak, the father-son co-founders and HLTH Foundation Techquity Impact Award recipients, spent decades waiting for the technology to catch up with their idea.  When GPT-3 arrived in 2020, they launched MIM, an artificial emotional intelligence companion that processes the to...

Most CEOs at VIVE were talking about what AI could do. Brent Dover, CEO of Carta Healthcare , came back to the Tech Glow Up with receipts. Since we last spoke in October, Carta grew revenue 50% in a single quarter, retained every customer, and is now in conversations with major health systems about platforming their entire abstraction operations at scale. The work is specific and the impact is rea...

What if the biggest barrier to healthcare AI wasn't the technology, but it was the workforce not yet equipped to use it? Dr. Pavitra Krishnamani is the newly appointed Director of AI and Digital Health Education at MD Anderson Cancer Center and an emergency physician who's been at the intersection of clinical care and digital health innovation for nearly a decade. Her answer to that ques...

The reality of health equity starts not in a clinic but in the community, addressing fundamental needs like housing, food, and transportation that doctors and nurses can't solve. These critical factors, known as Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), are the true barriers to living healthier and happier lives.  But who is on the ground, doing the vital work of connecting people with these reso...

Healthcare has a data problem, but not the kind most people assume. The information exists. It's scattered across dozens of systems that don't talk to each other, and every provider encounter requires reconstructing your story from scratch. In this live Vive 2026 episode, I sit down with three leaders each working on a different layer of that gap. Joe Hickey, VP of HIE and Provider Solut...

One pattern keeps showing up in the hundreds of conversations I have with CEOs and clinical innovation leaders: the companies that last are the ones that stay in service of the human relationship. Dr. Louise Chang, Global VP of Clinical Strategy at Elsevier and practicing internal medicine physician, is one of the clearest examples of that principle in action. "What if AI could actually take...